A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast

Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2023 There is a line that stretches from the northernmost tip of Denmark to where the Wadden Sea meets Holland in the south-west. Dorthe Nors, one of Denmark’s most acclaimed contemporary writers, grew up on this line; a native Jutlander, her childhood was spent among the storm-battered trees and wind-blasted beaches of the North Sea coast. In A Line in the World, her first book of non-fiction, she recounts a lifetime spent in thrall to this coastline – both as a child, and as an adult returning to live in this mysterious, shifting landscape. This is the story of the violent collisions between the people who settled in these wild landscapes and the vagaries of the natural world. It is a story of storm surges and shipwrecks, sand dunes that engulf houses and power stations leaching chemicals into the water, of sun-creased mothers and children playing on shingle beaches. In this singularly thrilling work, Nors invites the reader on a journey through history and memory – the landscape’s as well as her own. ‘A journey in [Nors’s] company is never a dull prospect… Along this mutable coast, on the border between map and myth, Nors is in her element’ – TLS ‘A beautiful, melancholy account of finding home on a restless coast. In Dorthe Nors’s deft hands, the sea is no longer a negative space, but a character in its own right. I loved it.’ – Katherine May, author of Wintering